What's the quickest way of adding bibliographic information e.g. from google scholar?

bjohas

Let's say I have an item in Zotero already, but the bibliography is incomplete, say authors / date missing. What's the quickest way to add this?

At the moment, I copy the title, then past that into google scholar, search for it, get the citation to clipboard, import from clipboard, and then merge with the existing item. This is really cumbersome.

How do I do this more quickly?

(This is assuming that the automated pdf retrieval did not work, because the item had no pdf in the first place, or there was no doi on the pdf...)

adamsmith

There's no super convenient way of doing this (and adding an "update item" function is planned in the medium run).
That said:

get the citation to clipboard, import from clipboard, and then merge with the existing item

is a bit puzzling. Why not import from google scholar via the URL bar icon?
https://www.zotero.org/support/getting_stuff_into_your_library?&#web_translators

bjohas

Sorry - I guess the copy to clipboard was because I was looking for a "paste from clipboard", which isn't possible. Basically I was hoping to avoid creating a duplicate item, and then merging it.

E.g. zutilo has a "paste tags from clipboard". Do you think it might be possible to have a "past bibliography data from clipboard" e.g. in zutilo? That would be helpful. (Merging, esp. when items have different types, is a pain.)

Thanks!!

adamsmith

much harder to do - tags are just pasted into a single field, after all - and even once that's solved, how do you deal with conflicts? So I don't think so, no.